


Too Much Love Will Kill You, Every Time

by cinnamonsnaps



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Fake Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-20 03:08:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19368727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinnamonsnaps/pseuds/cinnamonsnaps
Summary: His hands were clasped together - some loose imitation of prayer - and his head was bowed, but there was nothing in him that resembled supplication, not then.-other people have done brilliant interpretations of the idea of aziraphale finding a holy-watered demon in crowley's flat and assuming the worst, so here's my hot takemeanwhile, crowley has a nostalgic rant about dolphins in heaven, and narrative convenience (personified) has a laughing fit





	1. Chapter 1

Aziraphale sent Shadwell packing with a short sharp slap across the face. He wasn't proud of it, but needs must, and the man was hysterical. Crowley would have been proud. Soon, he was on his way to Madame Tracy's, leaving Aziraphale acutely aware of what little time was left.

One of Aziraphale's candles fell over - and Aziraphale stepped on it smartly, eyeing his beautiful,  _ flammable _ books, making sure the spark was quite extinguished. 

Out he stepped into the street, and prepared to find Crowley and give him what for. He locked the door securely - far more securely than it had rights to be - because you could never trust humans not to touch shiny blue objects in the middle of the floor.

Inside, the glow of the circle dulled, but didn't disappear: it ebbed and ebbed, but remained still, just under the dust...

 

* * *

 

At exactly the same time, Crowley left his flat, an incredibly angry demon trapped in his ansaphone, his bucket carefully dropped out the window and into a neighbour's garden where he didn't have to look at it anymore, and a puddle of slug-like goop all over his polished floor - and it would take more than elbow grease to remove that stain. 

He headed towards the book shop, because there was very little else he could do in these circumstances. The sky of London burned, the streets clammed up with cars that beeped their horns like panicking cattle lowing in a thunderstorm, and he had a feeling Aziraphale had been trying to tell him something important.

He didn't get that feeling very often. 

 

* * *

 

As the demon and the angel ostensibly headed on what should be the exact same route, from the very place the other person was trying to get to, an average reader might expect narrative convenience to allow them to meet somewhere in the middle with an ecstatic "oh, I was just coming to find you!" and a tasteful pan away while they catch up on the story so far. Life is rarely that simple, but sometimes it humours us long enough to provide such a clean, round ending to a troublesome event.

It should also be noted that life has a cruel sense of humour. 

Crowley and Aziraphale nearly met in the middle - in fact, they passed each other on parallel streets. If Aziraphale had looked left just at the right time, he could have caught Crowley's hand and said, I know where he is. 

If Crowley had looked left, he could have called out, Aziraphale! A funny thing just happened to me in the flat...

But Aziraphale was looking down at his feet, lost in thought, while Crowley was looking up at the red sky and thinking something maudlin about Romantic poets and their healthy fear of death. 

Someone might have laughed, if they were watching. 

 

* * *

 

"Crowley, listen to me, I know where the Antichrist is, and I'm not messing around with that dratted telephone any longer-"

 

The front door opened, and Aziraphale found nobody. 

He ambled down the hallway to what might pass for a living room, if someone reduced the concept of "living room" into its barest (and most fashionable) platonic ideal. 

 

"Crowley? Are you there? Listen, we need to go, I just got off the phone with the bloody Metatron - oh, that must be blasphemy, but we haven't got time-"

 

His mouth snapped shut. His shoe landed in something sticky. 

Something awfully, horribly sticky. 

 

* * *

 

He'd imagined, but never witnessed, what holy water would do to a demon. There was the suggestion of brimstone and hellfire in the concept of fire and water combining into steam. Some angels went in for smiting and holy wrath and all of that, but Aziraphale had never summoned the appropriate enthusiasm, not really. 

He'd wept at Sodom. 

So he'd heard stories. Up in smoke, one said, while another said, caustic like acid. Tore through it like paper. One less drip of evil wearing down the pillar of God. 

When he'd blessed a little tartan thermos, so small, so innocent, he'd thought: but this is it. This is the end in a bottle. This isn't a little discorporation, oops boss, messed up, fancy giving me a newer model? This is _ it.  _

He'd looked at Crowley gingerly holding it in his hands and realised, like a gut punch,  _ this man had both the will and the means to die at any time _ . This wonderful, terrible man, who wasn't really a man at all, who was the only thing Aziraphale could imagine staying by his side in the vast horror of eternity, could just go. 

 

And there, Aziraphale thought, by the grace of God, he went.

 

* * *

 

"Aziraphale!" 

The door did not withstand Crowley bursting into the unharmed, rather cosy book shop. 

"Where the hell are you? Angel?"

 

He hadn't been looking at his feet as he ran to the shop, and he didn't look at them now as he circled between the Dickens, the Wildes, the Jerome K Jeromes, the Virgils and the Homers, because if he had he would have seen it. He would have felt the sudden change in pressure as he crossed a thin line into a neatly drawn circle. 

"Aziraphale?" he said, and he felt it then. He looked down. He looked up. "Oh, for goodness' sake," he spat, and then disappeared.

 

* * *

 

 

The tartan thermos was under a chair. He picked it up, checked it, but he didn't need to. The floor was covered in it, and other substances.

He tried not to look at the floor. 

Of all things, there was a plant mister on the table. He squirted it absentmindedly into his hand, but it was just water. Just water, for the plants he was so proud of. 

He checked the bedroom - so many blankets, Crowley - and the kitchen - unused - and the bathroom, and the room full of plants, and then he walked through them again, hands behind his back, because the smell was too awful in the living room. He paced. He'd never really been one for pacing before. 

Something caught his eye on his second lap of the lounge. A little box with a flashing red light. He pressed a button and heard his own voice: "I know where the Antichrist is-"

When the message finished, a spark of electricity stung his hand and a single maggot fell from the receiver of the discarded handset. It smelt wrong, awful, the stench of evil rising up and curling like a crooked finger. It didn't smell like Crowley at all. 

With a wave of his hand, it burst into flames, charring into a scar on the wood. 

 

* * *

 

He sank onto the sofa. His face was, as it hadn't been for thousands of years, truly classically beautiful. A human bystander would have compared it to the marble statues that they dug up from Rome or Athens, so realistic and expressive, a true feat of chiselled features according to a great celestial balance that pleased the eye, or at least, a European classical eye. 

Cold, unmoving. Marble wasn't warm, wasn't pliant or soft. There was nothing warm about the angel in that moment. 

The sky darkened, even worse than it had been before as the End of all Days hastened closer. Londoners looked up, baffled, as storm clouds rolled together into a terrible black front. But Aziraphale did not look up.

He stared down, deep down, past the floors of the apartments, past the concrete and stone, the loam, the slime on which London was built, London on top of more London, down and down and down. His face was impassive. There was a great tension in the air suddenly, a hair-raising static like just before a lightning strike. 

 

"Go on then," he said, and now his head raised up. It became apparent he'd started crying, quietly, unflinchingly. "There's nothing else I could lose. What were his wrong questions, that made him Fall? If I asked them, would I - if I asked," and his shoulders seemed to raise a little, " _ why _ ?" 

There was no response. Of course not - She had not been taking calls for a very long time. He reminded himself: that didn't mean She wasn't listening. 

"Was he really too awful for this world?" Aziraphale said, voice low and so very quiet. "Irredeemable? The Adversary? Was he truly my enemy at all? Did he deserve to go, really go, by anyone's hand which wasn't mine?"

He glanced at the tartan bottle.

"And yet, I suppose, it was."

 

There was an ominous rumble from the distant skyline, and the clouds gathered together like spiteful children in the playground gathering round some helpless insect. 

 

"And am I supposed to continue?" he asked, but his voice broke, and he had to try again. "Am I supposed to continue here, without him?"

 

His hands were clasped together - some loose imitation of prayer - and his head was bowed, but there was nothing in him that resembled supplication, not then. 

 

"I cannot. My world has already ended."

A great spark of anger shivered its way through Soho, through the sodden streets and the nervous commuters, the humans, so tired, so short lived. It felt like Sodom again. 

Cultural memory remembers. It mutates and permutates and changes names in each telling, but Jesus was only 120 mothers ago, give or take, and only a few more still until the great acts of divine vengeance of cursed cities, unholy men, pillars of salt, plagues of locusts, and what else would mothers do but tell stories? As the anger leapt from person to person, they remembered, and feared, the first time they had learned that God could  _ take _ as easily as She gave. People remember, and then they did remember, starkly. 

They remembered Sodom. They remembered Gomorrah. 

 

The tension in the living room amped up to unbearable levels. Aziraphale's hair stood out in a static mess, and whenever he moved his hand, a burst of static shock would crackle. 

He was standing by the window now, looking at the horizon where land met sky, where Above and Below joined but never mixed, oil and holy water. 

 

Aziraphale thought,  _ I would let them all bu- _

He turned on his heel and walked out of the apartment before the end of the sentence could catch up with him. 

 

* * *

 

Crowley opened his eyes.

This was a terrible mistake. The light was so bright it made a humming sound in his brain when it overloaded his eyes, and the whole place was saturated with the kind of brutally efficient love that aimed lightning bolts at its targets. 

"Oh, fuck," he said, with feeling, earning the attention of a spectacularly well dressed angel standing behind a podium, who looked incredibly shocked. 

"A demon-" it muttered, raising a finger. "A hellspawn! A Fallen child, here, in the Kingdom-"

Behind him, a rank of angels stared, wide eyed, at the first proper demon they'd seen in several thousand years. 

"Don't mind me, wrong turning," Crowley said, backing away and looking around for the nearest exit. "Not interested. Where's the escalators?"

The angel drew itself up to its full height, wings included. It pulled a short weapon from somewhere within its glowing battledress. 

"Away with thee," it hissed, "foul presence, woe begotten tempter-"

"I don't give a flying pissrag about all of that right now!" Crowley whirled around, his arms raises, irritation dripping off his tongue. "Listen, I've got somewhere to be, some things to do, and absolutely none of it involves me getting into a game of silly buggers with a winged birdbrain like you!  _ Why doesn't Heaven have any lifts?" _

Ahead of him, he spotted it: a great globe, the Earth, in its current spherical configuration which he wasn't sure he approved of. It used to be flat, after all, before some idiots went and inflated it with astrophysics and imagination, and now it bobbed about the solar system so ungracefully, like a beach ball in a bath. 

He knew, somehow, that this was The Earth. Perhaps, if he just- 

"You shall not win this war," the angel continued, and advanced on him, sword swinging sharply. "Good shall prevail, while Evil flounders in the pure light of God."

Crowley felt the anger bite, and let it. "I don't want to win. I couldn't care less. I don't want this stupid war to happen in the first place. God, look at you, completely ignorant to what's right under your nose." He approached the globe, gazing down on it, the blue of the ocean reflecting off his shades and turning his eyes into great blue circles of cloud-ruffled sea. So big, so blue... "Did you ever even visit it? No, of course not, you had no reason to. You never saw the sun rise on the Tiber while the smoke of Rome rose. You've never climbed ev'ry mountain, have you? You never saw the waters rise after forty days, still beautiful, and I doubt you could tell me what the difference is between a porpoise and a dolphin. A big bouillabaisse..."

"The war is inevitable." The angel sounded wrathful. Crowley had never understood wrath. Where was the line? What was the difference between righteous wrath and the sin? 

Questions like those had already done their damage. 

"I didn't count out the hairs on the underside of every fern," Crowley hissed, hand reaching out to touch the globe, not yet, not quite, "for some idiot with a sword to go and blow it all up. I didn't hand pick the blues of the forget-me-not for you to stand here and tell me it's all collateral damage. Weeks, I spent on those blues. It's all about the right shade of blue, and you'll never understand that-"

Just as the sword swung to behead Crowley, his finger hit somewhere over England, and just like the first time, just like that awful day, he was falling. 

The difference was that there was no pain. Nothing was ripped from him this time. There was no sulfurous pit awaiting him, nor smoke trailing from his burning wings. 

Crowley fell into the deep blue, the perfect shade, the best job he'd ever worked on, and closed his eyes. 

It felt like falling home. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> yes the title is lyrics from a queen song of course it is

People crossed the street to avoid walking into Aziraphale. There was something in his expression which brought a rather literal sense to the phrase "a face like thunder". 

He  _ needed _ to get to Tadfield, even if it was just him. This had gone on long enough, and soon, there wouldn't be any more  _ enough _ to go on. 

He  _ needed _ to find a way to get there, either by car, by plane, by flying - any way at all, as long as the destination was within walking distance of the boy who would end it all. 

He  _ needed _ to calm down and think. He  _ needed _ to act now, if he wanted to save the world. 

 

But Aziraphale  _ wanted _ to go to a bar and drink. He'd always liked a rich red, a fruity white, the crispness of grapes put under torture and wrangled into wine. He'd always been terrible at denying himself anything. Perhaps it didn't matter anymore: perhaps it all could wait. 

 

Which was how a very disconcerted bartender called Raf found himself pouring bottomless drinks to a terrifyingly beautiful man in the mid-afternoon, who should have slipped off his chair in a fit of alcohol poisoning several bottles ago. 

Right now the man was swirling whisky around a stout glass, staring into it with weepy eyes. 

The bartender, on the whole, never asked. It wasn't a high paying job and he wasn't qualified to give advice, and sometimes, when some people got talking, you just couldn't get them off you again, like a particularly verbose limpet. 

 

But this man hadn't breathed a word. And Raf wasn't sure if there was an ambulance call on the cards. He'd managed to get through three bottles of his top shelf whiskey alone. 

"Y'alright mate?" he asked, his brummie-pakistani twang sounding musical and soft in comparison to the cockney buzz of his neighbours, as he tapped on the blond man's shoulder. "Something wrong?"

"I'm celebrating," the man replied shortly, voice rough. 

Raf proceeded cautiously. He signalled to the young waitress he employed to get the phone ready. 

"Oh?"

"I killed," the man said, "my worst enemy."

Raf considered, carefully, that the man wasn't slumped over in a deathlike state (and wondered what the hell his liver was made of). In fact, he seemed to be perfectly fine, and not wanting to be disturbed at all. There was something about him that put Raf on edge, very slightly: not in the way a bad customer would, where Raf would discreetly make a few calls to relevant authorities afterwards, but in the way he had forgotten about. The way he felt as a child when his grandma told him about the messengers of Yam Raj, when he hadn't been able to sleep for two days after, too afraid they'd pop under his door and say, Raf, come with me...

"I'm sorry to hear that."

He walked away quickly, and only returned to place a whole bottle of gin in front of the man. 

 

* * *

 

The windows were taped over with cardboard and duct tape. The eerie sound of Gregorian chant hummed through the still air, disturbing the smoke of several black candles and long tendrils of incense. 

The Great Summoner, the Liturgical Keeper of Ritual, gently let a drop of blood fall to the floor from a little cut on her thumb. 

The drop fell through the air before it landed on the forehead of a ram skull at the centre of an intricate chalk drawing of a demon summoning circle. 

There was moment of silence. The Great Summoner held her breath. 

 

A great whistling noise made itself apparent, needling its way through the roof. The Great Summoner looked up slowly. It got louder, and louder, and louder, until - 

 

Crowley landed with a crash, and assumed he'd landed in Hell. It was dark, after all, and it stank of patchouli, and there were candles everywhere. He blinked away the double vision, massaged his head, and slowly stood up - noting that some idiot had left some kind of bone on the floor, unfortunately crushed now by his sudden entrance. 

"Beelzebub?" he said, squinting at the black hooded figure before him, who had fallen back and was holding onto a dresser for support. 

"..." The figure approached, and Crowley caught a glimpse of a human hand pointing at him from a long, wide sleeve. "You're a demon!"

Crowley felt for his shades and found that they'd fallen off during his descent. "And you're not. Where am I?"

The Summoner stood tall, pride filling her chest as she examined the demon before her. Sure, he was a bit lean on the "terrifying muscles to rip my enemies apart" front, and his lips weren't the luscious "I want to fornicate with the spawn of hell" lips she'd requested, but this was her first successful attempt. There was always room to improve. 

"Hello, my servant," she said, and in fairness her voice only wobbled slightly. "You have entered into my domain, and now you must do my bidding. I grant to thee my - hang on, I had a contract - hold on-"

She threw some old clothes aside and pulled out a small notebook. It had cartoon unicorns on it. 

"Here! I pledge to thee my immortal soul in exchange, and only on receipt of, fame, power, glory, and hot boys."

Crowley looked down at the chalk. Strange sigils and complicated lines surrounded him. "Oh. Is that what this is?"

"And you fell for it! So, what happens next?" The Summoner said eagerly. Her pastor had tried to scare her off by warning her of all the dangerous, perverse activities the demon would inflict upon her remorselessly, and she was rather hoping they'd start soon. 

Crowley stepped forward, and she said, "ah! Ah ah ah, you can't leave the circle without my permission."

"What? Why?" he replied, baffled, and she pointed at the sigils. 

"One, there's a circle of salt around you which you can't cross, and two, I drew the sigils of holding and imprisonment so you can't leave."

Crowley looked at the sigils again. "That one says 'mozzarella'* in demonic. Are you sure I can't just leave?"

 

(*An easy mistake to make. It was only one little squiggly line off.)

 

"No it doesn't," she said with a grin. "You're just trying to trick me."

"No, it - oh, I don't have time for this, where the he- the heav- where the fuck am I?" Crowley said, irritation rising. 

The Summoner shook her finger at him. "You are in the Church of Baphomet, Centre of the Leylines of Thoth, and I am your priestess! This is consecrated ground in the name of Evil and Justness-"

"So, your bedroom, got it."

"It is not!" she squeaked, and turned red. "Unless that changes how amenable you are to breaking loose and doing dark things. In which case it is."

"Dark things? Sweetheart, I don't do requests. What kind of dark things?"

"Oh, um. Electing me Queen of Earth, bringing about the End of the Current Civilisation, and - um - well, my pastor said there would be..."

"End of Civilisation?" Crowley spat. "I can do you one better if I stay here any longer." And with that, he started striding forward, aiming to shove past her and leave the circle and find out just  _ where _ he was and how he could get back to the task at hand-- 

 

As he crossed the line, a sigil glowed and sparked. The Summoner had been very careful in copying the sigils from the dodgy website she'd found, which was the kind of site where the text was red and the background was black or a repeated jpeg of a black goat. 

Crowley couldn't have expected what happened next. After all, he could have told her that her summoning circle was a bunch of nonsense and that most internet guides were written by people who wanted to either test their creative writing skills or had some rather hallucinogenic experiences in college. He'd landed there by pure chance*.

 

(*Or pure narrative convenience.)

 

So there was no way the sigils should have held. No way one should have smoked and burned and unleashed its spell on him. 

It was an easy mistake to make. She'd tried to copy the sigil for "PRISON". It was only one little squiggly line off. 

 

The sigil for "SEEK HOME" glowed and smacked Crowley right between the eyes, and he suddenly had the uniquely unpleasant experience of splitting into pieces. 

 

* * *

 

In a nightclub in London built on the foundations of what was once a rather prestigious gentleman's club, several extremely confused young men found themselves reenacting a dance which had been out of style for several hundred years. 

The DJ was nonplussed. It wasn't usually this busy this early, and he was more than certain he'd queued up some pretty banging electro jams for the night, but it seemed he'd lost the thread of the evening at some point. 

The men bent at the knees, rhythmically, while an extremely drunk blond man with a face like marble glowered and jigged with professional accuracy. 

"Up and at 'em!" he roared, wielding his jollity like a blunt object and battering everyone in the room with it. "Now partners two and six!"

Mister Two and Mister Six crossed the dance floor and kissed each other's cheeks, hearts hammering with something between fear and joy. After all, for some reason they were suddenly feeling extremely loved -  _ or else _ . 

As they separated, the blond man clapped and everyone linked arms. 

"Very good! Dance like there's no tomorrow!"

Every participant had heard this phrase before at least once in their lives, given their propensity for going to raves and discos. They'd never heard it used as a  _ threat _ before. 

Aziraphale danced. It was all he could think to do, and he wasn't even supposed to be doing it. Angels didn't dance.

Maybe he wasn't quite angel anymore. 

As he turned with a partner and whirled in a beige flurry of cloth, his partner seemed to do something funny with his expression, until finally, he said:

"Oh, that's going to smart."

Aziraphale laughed. It was not a happy laugh. "Sorry, my boy, did I step on your foot?"

"Angel?" The partner - a chubby ginger man with warm, ruddy cheeks - peered at him and squinted. "What are you doing?"

Aziraphale stared at him, stunned. He said: "Crowley? Is that you?"

"What's that noise? Are you in a- is this a  _ nightclub- _ "

"Oh,  _ Crowley _ ," Aziraphale breathed out, and disrupted the dance irreparably by pulling the ginger man into a deep embrace. "Oh, please tell me you're really here."

"Yes and no," Crowley said, his voice coming from the ginger man's mouth. "I'm kind of in several different places at the moment. There's a bit of me in the Bentley and a bit in the park, and I think - ah, this is your shop - seriously, is this a club? Why are you clubbing? I thought you didn't like clubs."

Aziraphale shook his head where it was lodged in not-Crowley's shoulder. "I don't, oh I  _ don't _ , but I was so lonely, so horribly lonely, oh Crowley-" and for a moment was completely incoherent. Crowley gingerly instructed his host body to pat Aziraphale's arm. 

"What the hell did I miss?"

"Hell," Aziraphale answered earnestly. "That's just it. You missed  _ Hell _ ." 

As they swayed, and the dancers looked around awkwardly, and Crowley's host body turned vaguely purple, Crowley felt like he'd missed the memo rather. 

"... how do I get my own body back? I'm seeing several places at the same time and it's giving me a  _ splitting _ headache." 

Aziraphale giggled rather too much for a single pun, and stepped back with unabashed relief and joy. "Yes, quite right, I think we've put this poor young man through the ringer enough already. Meet me at home, Crowley."

Crowley smiled, which was rare. It was genuine and soft, which was even rarer. 

"I'm already there," he said. 

Like a light switched off, the ginger man stepped into himself again, and Aziraphale could tell the alien occupant was gone. 

"Gentlemen," he called out, quickly sobering up with a grimace. "I haven't had such a good- an emotional- a  _ time _ since the 19th century. Safely home now."

 

He walked out. The young men looked around, feeling at a loss now their Benevolent  _ By All Means Necessary _ dance leader had abandoned them. 

"Weird bloke, but..." said one. 

Another, who had quite enjoyed getting to kiss everyone's cheeks and dancing while keeping everyone else's sweat at arm's length, said, "should we... continue?"

"Do you remember the moves?"

Miraculously, he did.

 

* * *

 

Much later - much, much later - Aziraphale would hold Crowley's arm and lean in, and let him know exactly how furious he was with Crowley for letting him think he'd died, for good. 

When Crowley caught his breath again - stupid man, he didn't need it - he explained how sorry he was, but he had been in a bit of a rush, and if his angel didn't mind it, he'd like to apologise again for scaring him. 

Narrative convenience gave them some privacy this time. Some things happen without her interference.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> god this was fun to write, i love writing angst and humour mixed together  
> thank you everyone for the kind comments!! this little experiment of what if was on my mind for a while so i had to get it on paper.
> 
> honestly id be happy to continue it but i have no idea where it would go from here, so in the meanwhile, check out my other gomens fic. okay thanks for reading!!


End file.
